Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't Organic Maps the open source successor of Maps.me?
And CoMaps the successor of Organic
TIL about CoMaps
The future is not self-hosted
321–330 of 459 posts
Re: The future is not self-hosted
#322I'd say self-hosting on the verge of becoming ubiquitous and accepted.
The whole sales pitch of cloud providers is that instaling and maintaining a server is just too hard for the average Joe.
Thing is the average Joe already has at least 2 dedicated servers in their home - their router and their IoT hub. Both are designed to be servers, and talk to third party endpoints over the internet.
While I'm not crazy about IoT, I think we are reaching the point where most people have something digital in their house that makes sense to be networked.
And thanks to IoT stuff, running and managing servers has become a certified Dad activity, like woodworking and home improvement.
I know multiple dads, who had no prior exposure to IT, who have set up rather complex Raspberry Pi based home automation systems, managing all the complexity of setting up and running a server at home.
I think the skills and interest are proliferating, and it's no longer going to be accepted wisdom to just rely on some nebuluous remote cloud provider, esp for simple stuff.
Re: The future is not self-hosted
#323Earlier quoted context omitted.
Totally! Before going the full self-hosted route, I actually had an old computer I used as a simple NAS. For this project, I was just looking to make everything as easy to use as any other app my wife and I were used to. Thanks for reading and commenting!
If this is the goal (and I think it's a perfectly commendable goal), you being afraid of the public web makes it basically impossible. Honestly - just make the service public. Let your wife share links to her photo albums with her friends - have them point to your domain. Make your friends make accounts on your services if they need to - or better yet, provision accounts automatically for them (I do this). I understa…
Thank you for your comment this is really enlightening! I'd love to learn more about services you're hosting for friends and neighbors and how that works technically and socially. If you're interested in connecting – please email me hn@drewlyton.com
Re: The future is not self-hosted
#324I think people are dismissing the possibility of universally accessible self-hosting too quickly. We really need to be ambitious as engineers and imagine a future where people have sovereignty over their own computing. In 1990, we wouldn't have accepted someone else taking custodianship of our personal documents, memories, books, music, and films, and yet it's normalized today. With the benefit of hindsight, we need…
Thanks for your comment! I still think though that this puts way too much on each individual – no matter how easy you make the tech. But, I could see a world where just like running tech support for my parent's computers, I also do so for their server. That's an interesting take!
Re: The future is not self-hosted
#325LLMs slot into this conversation in a really interesting way. The things the author set up are technologically mature enough that, as long as you have the media, or as long as you can get your friends to use it, the self-hosted versions are largely better than the commercial ones. The last decade or so of innovation has really been about figuring out how to monetize these technologies, at the expense of UX. This is i…
Totally agree! I relied a lot on Claude Code to help me with issues I was having setting up hardware encoding in Immich. But I also think – as accessible as LLMs are as a tool – they still don't make the complexities of self-hosting trivial. Maybe they'll get there, but I feel like LLMs really are just another coding abstraction. It's like a programming language. You still need to know how the language works and how the underlying "bare metal" works to make anything reliably.
But, I could be wrong! Thanks for reading and commenting!
Re: The future is not self-hosted
#326Self hosting reminds me of the world of smartphones just before the advent of the iPhone. Using a phone as a mini computer was possible. Downloading and using apps happened. I even used offline maps. It was still the preserve of nerds while regular people "couldn't understand why you'd use a phone to do anything other than text and call". SUDDENLY once it became seamless and trivial to set everything and it was all b…
My impression as a high-schooler (at the time) of what made the iPhone so captivating for others, was that it had Shazam, and all of the features of the iPod touch, and all of the features of iPods before the touch. You could hold your phone up anywhere and learn what song was playing, and as far as I could tell that was basically it; very much a fashion thing like Starbucks (before the unjustified popularity of that…
I had the iPod Touch and iPhone relatively early (well, much earlier than the general population). I don't remember Shazam being important at all, I think I only discovered it a few years later.
What blew pretty much everyone away that I showed it is how incredibly smooth web browsing was (remember, there were no apps on the original iPhone and even after that it took a little while for apps to really take off). Most smartphones at the time had clunky resistive touch screens or even little joysticks to move a mouse pointer. With the iPhone, you could scroll with your fingers and it was butter-smooth (at least for the day). The iPhone was a game-changer because you had a device in your pocket that you could browse the web with and it was at least as easy as on a desktop, if not easier.
Just for comparison, this is how you browsed the web at the time on probably the most iconic smartphone at the time (Blackberry):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NuQrjBIofo&t=6s
and on an iPhone:
Re: The future is not self-hosted
#327The title is showing quite a lot of ankle! OP is a proud self hoster. I run my own email, DNS and the rest. Yes: email. I run several domains including my own company and my own vanity domain and several more for friends. I have been doing it for decades. Goog, MS and co do follow standards and if you do too, they will be largely merciful if you keep your nose clean. I have even managed to run an email system from my…
Haha! "Showing a lot of ankle" – I've never heard that before! Thanks for reading and commenting – very cool that you've managed to successfully host email. I'm sad advertisers and spammers have turned that into essentially an unusable technology.
Definitely a proud self hoster, but the main point is really that I don't think we're going to live in a world where self-hosting is the dominant method of using internet-based apps and services. Would love to be wrong though! Maybe we'll all be self-hosting email in a few years!
Re: The future is not self-hosted
#328I actually thought a lot about this, and I feel it relates to my job in health services. I'm tired of hearing the Norwegian government talk about AI and modernization. Before we chase the next big trend, we need to solve fundamental problems. We should have one public, centralized provider for digital identity and authentication. We also need a single, secure messaging service for healthcare personnel and residents.…
> centralized provider for digital identity and authentication. No. Stop pushing this crap. It's what all security companies are lobbying for to get that juicy money and surveillance heavy power hungry governments want to push on next to keep on the path of no anonymity and speech control. They already do it in many ways. Don't hand them the keys for the next oppression. I don't care if your intentions are good. The…
Are you against governments issuing passports too?
I don't understand why a government that can be trusted enough to issue passports, but cannot be trusted to issue a digital passport.
Failing to do so will simply lead to Apple or Alphabet being the trusted entity that decides who is who.
Similarly, a government can be trusted to maintain a database of banks and insure the banks' customers' deposits, but a government cannot be trusted to maintain a database of all the people's electronic money accounts directly? (in the US, I know in some countries, the government does operate electronic money accounts and transfers)
Re: The future is not self-hosted
#329Well, my whole ebook collection sits on my computer and is managed via Calibre. I only buy books where I get a file without DRM. If there is DRM I don't buy.
My whole music collection sits on my computer in the form of well sorted mp3/flac/wav files. I buy only music where I get files or a physical carrier medium (Vinyl, Tapes, ...)
My whole movie/series collection sits on a jellfin server I can reach via wireguard from literally everywhere.
You get the idea. For me having the file and being able to scroll through my collection and decide what to pick from my collection is part of the fun. I am a musician myself and I earn more in a week in bandcamp (a few hundred bucks a year) than I would earn in 100 years on Spotify (60 cents a year), so if you wanna support the artists, doing it this way benefits them greatly.
Re: The future is not self-hosted
#330The fundamental problem here is that bad apples don’t respect common sense agreements. If everyone who owned a kindle book, agreed to never share the downloaded version of the book for free on the internet, companies would not have to do this. I don’t see what’s the solution, if buying a kindle ebook is allowing you to share it for free on the internet. In the past people were limited by a physical copy, they could g…
I see this claim often but bypassing DRM is an inevitability to the point where it's commonly done within hours of a new release simply for the fun of doing it. And to quote Gabe Newell (founder and owner of Valve, the company that operates Steam): > "We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem," he said. "If a pirate offers a product…
Thank you for this!